—Just what you said, Agapito rushed scornfully, they’re jokes. Of no importance. I found them boring myself. I admire the book’s ideas but not its style. Frankly, I wish he had done less burlesque.
—You may as well read a sermon then!
—I prefer to be informed, not indulged.
—So you prefer novels to be political catechism?
—I prefer that my country be saved.
It was a few days later—our small room still reeked of crab roe and sizzling squid and my brain hurt from the dregs of the lambanog—that Agapito returned from one of his soirees, wearing his leather shoes and his uncles’ undertaker clothes, his mustache smelling of his dinner as always. Just add perfume, and I would have guessed he was in love.
I whispered to him.
—Agapito!
—You still awake? Keep quiet. You’ll disturb the others.
I kept my voice down.
—Are you a Mason?
Silence.
—Why do you say that?
—You’re a Mason. You go to meetings late at night. You’re going to get caught. Your mother will die of a heart attack. Your father will kill you. Your uncles will tear out your liver.
—Sssh. Do you have a fever? Go to sleep.
I observed Agapito’s comings and goings with quiet foreboding. “Observed” of course is merely my figure of speech. It was maybe because I could not see at night—not much anyway (and it is worse now, as I wallow in this dank cavern of vermin and regret), shades of blackness, not even grays, layers of dim outlines that populated my insomnia—that I observed so keenly. Slight rustle of nipa, crackle of wood in the humid night, cockroach wings, scuttle of beetles. I could hear a Guardia Civil’s footsteps long before anyone noticed the rat was around. I had the ears of a bat. In daytime, I had little trouble: the eyeglasses ground for me at the Botica Luciano by Agapito’s uncles had the ugly functionality of our modern world. They worked. And though year by year they became heavier, and despite my knowledge of Cervantes and Alexandre Dumas I knew no one would love me, every day I blessed the miracles of science.
That at night sight shuts down for me, or at least what passes for sight in this limited world, only my closest friends appreciated—and of those, no one comprehended completely the extent of my darkness.
I never spoke of it.
The converse of this was that my other senses throw the most trivial of things into relief, rather than oblivion.
The exact moment of Agapito’s arrival on our street’s gravel, the place where he hid things late at night (a blunt object, like a jar; something light but cumbersome, rattling in a box; a small metallic object, perhaps a key), and the tired heavings of his lambanog breath, tobacco wind of his fibrous mustache, all occurred in frightening clarity but then regulated into predictable routine.
I must say I recall things now in detail, as if Agapito were snoring beside me, his Adam’s apple restless even in sleep, and to be honest I wish it were so: what would I not give to have Agapito loudly alive, disturbing my rest?
These registers were, of course, only some among many in the sensory jumble of those days, when I myself was sunk in insomniac panic. This is when it began, my descent into sleepless anxiety, which still occurs now, maybe with equal intensity but I just don’t notice, inured in this damp desperate cell to my dull dread. I imagine drawings and quarterings of different parts of my body, things lost, found, and snatched, faces rising from graves. In my waking dreams I keep imagining dead the people I loved, and I recognize it is only wishful thinking.
At that time, in the day books lulled me into sanity but at night I had to fend for myself.
Agapito’s mysterious movements provided respite and diversion. When finally he admitted his secret, it was no surprise, but still the frisson of discovery made my skin crawl.
Most of all, I was jealous.
There I was, believing I possessed a key with my knowledge of the secret and wandering novel, and Agapito had read it a whole year before me! Not only that—there was a second novel, darker, more rational and disturbing, and I, a misfit dreamer, had to hear about its plot second-hand, from Agapito. (My guess was that he, in turn, had also borrowed from some cynical savant his own offhand summations.) His group of friends, Agapito boasted, was aware of the most advanced things, the newest ideas from Europe!
I should meet them, he said.
Why had I not wondered, that night of Benigno’s seafood feast, how Agapito, too, had managed to get hold of the book when I had not lent it to him? I already understood I was not a rare convert into a select fraternity. I was only one among many with roused desire, stricken into fervor for one of a number of common reasons.
We were a proliferating fan club with abjectly identical persuasions—each of us shockingly unoriginal. Others preferred to call it love of country; but I was disappointed that my passon was so universal.
Worse, I was behind in the news.
In my romantic lethargy, I had missed other controversies, and Agapito divulged the author was incognito in Hong Kong, or maybe in the pocket of the Prussians, and some writers were even better than he, such as M. Calero, or L. O. Crame, my God, what polemicists!, whoever they were, we just did not have access to all the periodicals, and if I wanted to I could go to their meetings in Ermita, where Agapito and his cohorts discussed politics with a paralytic.
I was envious.
Agapito now had a sense of purpose, even though he spoke in that excitable voice, kind of like an aborted castrato, that did not go well with his mature mustache, and he still looked like a matchstick swimming in his uncles’ dark American suits. I imagined crowds of
